See what changed on a WordPress site, immediately

Have you ever had a WordPress site break unexpectedly?

Not an obvious, white screen, error-messages-everywhere break. Those are easy to spot. What I’m talking about are things that are barely noticeable:

An image stops loading

An important button gets hidden

The Instagram feed stops working

A private page gets revealed to the public

Maybe you didn’t notice – maybe your client noticed first! And they were MAD – even if it wasn’t your fault. You’re the expert! You should know how to prevent totally unforeseeable and out-of-your-control problems, right?!

Of course not! But having an important WordPress site break without you noticing is like having someone tell you there’s spinach in your teeth at an important business meeting. It’s embarrassing, you feel like a goof, and you wish it never happened.

Maintaining WordPress sites can get really complicated

There are so many things that can change on a WordPress site:

Core updates

Settings, media and content changes

Plugins and themes from the dark corners of the internet

Customizations you made

Updates break things. Clients break things. You break things. And the only way to truly know if the site is working is to examine it. Each and every page.

But that takes hours, and usually things are OK, and you have more important things to spend your time on, right? Cross your fingers, click “update”, and hope for the best!

But when the site breaks and the client finds out, you’re the one who suffers! It makes you look silly – how did you not notice you broke their important page?!

What if you could see WordPress issues before they become a problem?

Imagine saying to your client:

“Hey, I saw that an image on your sales page isn’t loading – did you mean to do that?

Or:

“I see a (really embarrassing) error message on one of your pages – did you update any plugins recently?”

Or:

“I noticed your checkout page changed yesterday – do you want me to fix it to how it was before?”

If you could see WordPress changes as they happen, you could WOW your clients instead of disappointing them.You’d save the day before clients even knew they had a problem.

Manually checking every page wastes so much time

How can you avoid wasting hours looking over a site? Automated testing. In particular, something called Visual Regression Testing. It’s a technical term that means the following:

You take screenshots of a WordPress site

You compare those fresh screenshots to screenshots that were taken earlier

If there are any changes (regressions), you are alerted about the differences

You decide if the differences are bad or good, and act accordingly

Visual Regression Testing is SUPER POWERFUL because it tests what really matters: How a website looks. All of the moving parts of a WordPress site work together to make the end result: A finished webpage. That’s all that really matters for most clients!

But Visual Regression Testing is also hard to do right: It involves lots of setup, maybe some programming, and plenty of tweaking to be sure it’s not alerting you about stuff you don’t care about.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a tool that “just worked” for testing WordPress sites?

I thought so! And that’s why I built WPAutoTest.

WPAutoTest is automatic visual testing for WordPress sites that emails you when a site has changed. Here’s what you see in your email when it detects a change:

Do you contact your client and fix the issue? Or, is this an expected change that you can ignore? It’s up to you! But now you have the information and the power to save your clients from themselves.

WPAutoTest serves 2 purposes:

It prevents non-technical users from accidentally breaking their site. WPAutoTest does a regular scan of a WordPress site and alerts you if anything changed.

It quickly detects unwanted changes after you update a site. You can manually scan a whole site any time with a click of a button.

I have a service that monitors my website’s uptime! Why do I need WPAutoTest?

Uptime monitoring only tells you whether a site is loading or not. It does not tell you if something is broken on a page – so long as it’s loading, the uptime monitor will not notice anything. This is fine if you want to prevent downtime, but not good enough to catch other types of issues common on WordPress sites: plugin conflicts, 3rd-party API errors, CSS conflicts, etc.

There are other visual testing tools out there. Why would I use WPAutoTest?

Most visual testing tools have one of two shortcomings:

They’re made for developers, with a big learning curve and/or a specific deployment process involved.

They’re not made specifically for WordPress, and don’t handle the specialized issues related to WordPress, WooCommerce, etc.

Some of the tools out there are truly excellent! But none of them served all my needs in maintaining WordPress sites. The goal of WPAutoTest is provide you easy setup and rich, valuable information for testing and monitoring the WordPress sites you maintain.

Can WPAutoTest scan multiple pages on a site?

Yes! Sometimes the most important (and fragile!) pages on a WordPress site aren’t the homepage. WPAutoTest can scan any page on a WordPress site and alert you if it changes.

I don’t have clients, but I still have sites I’d like to monitor. Can I use WPAutoTest?

I’ve also spent time with other programming languages & frameworks where testing websites is SO MUCH EASIER than WordPress. My dream is to bring the testing tools available in non-WordPress programming to WordPress developers and maintainers.

Automated testing saves so much time and money, and it makes developers & maintainers happier. Why not bring it to WordPress?!

How much does WPAutoTest cost?

Pricing is to be determined, but it will start at approximately $29/month and will cost around $1.00/site/month for folks who are testing lots of sites.

Can I try WPAutoTest?

WPAutoTest is currently in beta. Please click the button below, fill out the form, and I will contact you when a spot is open. I will personally onboard you & your clients’ sites into WPAutoTest.